Back on FXM Retro, April 1, 2017

I'm looking at the upcoming schedule of FXM Retro, and see a couple of movids that came up in the past few weeks at least, although I don't think I mentioned any of them on the blog the most recent time they showed up.

First up, at 9:45 AM tomorrow, you can catch Man on a Tightrope. Actually, you can catch it today at 1:10 PM as well. It showed up in 2010 and 2013, and I think is available on the Elia Kazan box set.

Man on a Tightrope will be followed at 11:35 AM by Caprice. Doris Day does her 1960s spy spoof, and does a capable job of it, in a movie that's entertaining enough without being great. Caprice will also be on on Sunday.

FXM's Saturday lineup concludes at 1:15 PM with a movie I'm not certain I've gotten around to seeing before, Bedazzled. Dudley Moore sells his soul to Satan, played by Moore's comedic partner Peter Cook. These two weren't quite as good in The Wrong Box as Michael Caine and Nanette Newman, or especially the two old guys, Ralph Richardson and John Mills, but certainly not as irritating as Peter Sellers was. So I can see the Moore/Cook team being an acquired taste.

Thursday Movie Picks #142: TV Period Dramas

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of "Thursday Movie Picks", the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This is one of the monthly TV-themed editions, looking at TV shows set in a period past. Now, period drama usually has a specific meaning, but I decided to stretch it by picking a western as well since I don't watch too much episodic TV.



The Rifleman (1958-1963). Chuck Connors plays Lucas McCain, who has a way with his rifle, while teaching his son a moral lesson in under a half hour. This one is currently on MeTV during the Saturday dinner hour, at least if you eat early like old people. I helped Dad take care of Mom for quite a few years before Mom died, so I live with him and we eat an early dinner every night, so this one is always on during Saturday dinner. (Well, I also work the 6:00 AM - 2:30 PM shift, so I have other good reasons for eating an earlier dinner.)



The Waltons (1972-1981). Family drama about a family living in West Virginia during the Depression era. Former movie star Ellen Corby played Grandma Walton, with Will Geer playing Grandpa. The movie was based on the works of Earl Hamner; the material had already been turned into the movie Spencer's Mountain starring Henry Fonda and Maureen O'Hara. If you've seen the TV show The Waltons, you'll recognize some of the scenes in the movie, especially the one when everybody goes to bed for the night. Except that the eldest son in the movie is named "Clay-boy", not "John-boy".



All Creatures Great and Small (1980s, BBC). Based on the books by James Herriot (real name James Whyte), a veterinarian in northern England in the 1930s, the end of the era when veterinarians were more involved with agriculture and less with people's pets. Herriot wrote several books, which did have plots although they're generally thought of as being collections of short stories. Mom had the books (formatted differently in the States from the UK) when I was a kid in the 1970s, and the TV show showed up on PBS. I think there are some PBS stations that still run it.

Post race-films

I'm looking at tonight's lineup on TCM, and the prime time theme is "African-American Independents". However, most of the lineup is from after what would be considered the "race film" era. Of the first four movies, the only one I've tried to sit down to watch is The Learning Tree at 10:00 PM, which aired on TCM one Martin Luther King Day. Well, probably more than one MLK day, since TCM seem to wind up with the rights to the same limited selection of films seen as fitting the day. I'm sorry to say that I found the first half-hour or so of The Learning Tree slow and meandering, and I found myself unable to sit through the rest of it.

At the end of the evening, there are two films from the race film era. First at 3:00 AM is The Symbol of the Unconquered, an Oscar Micheaux movie about a light-skinned black woman inheriting her grandfather's farm, only to have to face prejudice when she actually tries to run the place. Unfortunately, not all the reels survive, or at least didn't when I watched this one on TCM. There was an intertitle at the opening about how some of the deleted scenes have been replaced by other intertitle descriptions, but what should probably be the best parts, the climactic fight with the Klan, are on the missing reels.

That will be followed at 4:15 AM by Go Down, Death!, from director Spencer Williams. Williams also directed Dirty Gertie from Harlem, USA, a race film version of Somerset Maugham's "Rain"/"Miss Sadie Thompson", except that Williams had to change the ending of that one for the sensibilities of black audiences. Go Down, Death! sounds interesting, about a juke joint owner who tries to frame a preacher by having loose women cavort with him. It's not the one I wanted to see, however. The original selection for the night, or at least what was on the monthly schedule when I downloaded it at the end of February, was Blood of Jesus. I ran across the ending of that one in a previous TCM airing, and was pleased to see it on the schedule, but when I looked at the end of last week, it had been replaced by Go Down, Death!.

Bicycle film festival?

So the following item appeared in my RSS feeds this morning, courtesy of Radio New Zealand:

Sound Archives: the Bicycle Film Festival

It's 200 years since the first bike was built, and in New Zealand, we've been using them for more than 140 years. Nga Taonga Sound and Vision is celebrating bikes with a film festival devoted to cycling, which opens tonight. Di Pivac from Nga Taonga talks us through the programme.

The website for the festival is here; the Nga Taonga archive has a page about last year's festival, not this year's. Radio New Zealand's page allows you to stream the audio (just under 10 minutes) or download it (just under 10MB).

As for the festival itself, there's an amazing amount of buzzword crap on it, which to my eye comes across as directed at a stereotype of a class of people who would attend film festivals. Those old saws about foreign films being pretentious and only liked by a certain class of English-speakers? Yeah, that class. Do you know anybody who "demands" to have their bicycle story told on film? Seriously? And they're making it difficult to find what movies are being shown?

George Francis Barnes Jr.

I've been watching some of the extras on DVDs hoping to come up with ideas for blog posts. The Picture Snatcher DVD that I've mentioned a couple of times already has a newsreel on it in addition to the shorts I've blogged about and a couple of trailers. Well, actually it only has a piece of a newsreel, since the clip is just under a minute. It's about the arrest of George Francis Barnes Jr., better known as Machine Gun Kelly. That's him in the photo above, about to be put on a plane to Oklahoma City to stand trial. Note that it's an American Airways plane, and as you can guess from the clip, it's the sort of smallish plane that seems standard from movies of the 1930s; two wheels on the front and what looks like one under the tail, with the floor of the fuselage on an angle when people board and only needing a couple of steps up from the ground.

The other interesting thing to note from the newsreel clip is that it was made by "Hearst Metrotone News". William Randolph Hearst had also founded Cosmopolitan Productions, in part as a vehicle for his mistress Marion Davies, and Cosmopolitan Productions were distributed by MGM until 1934, when Cosmopolitan switched to distribution by Warner Bros. The newsreels, however, were actually distributed by Fox (not yet combined with Twentieth Century of course) until 1934, at which point distribution switched to MGM. Kelly was arrested in September 1933, so I'd assume that the newsreel clip on Picture Snatcher was released by Fox, with Hearst Metrotone retaining ownership. I don't know how Warner Home Video ended up with all of these. They could have been part of the MGM holdings Ted Turner acquired, or perhaps ended up with Warner Home Video some other way.

Bob's Picks

I was looking at tonight's TCM lineup, and the website lists the theme as "Bob's Picks". In some ways, it seems rather morbid, considering that Robert Osborne died earlier this month. But of course, the schedules are done a couple of months in advance, and at the time these were done, management at TCM probably had no idea Osborne was going to die. (I have no idea how sick he was for how long.)

Stil, it will be interesting to see if tonight's intros have been redone following Osborne's death, since I think all of the intros would have been done sometime in February.

And ooh, there's a Hugo Haas movie in tonight's lineup.

Briefs for March 27-28, 2017

For those of you who like opera music, you're in luck, as tonight's TCM lineup is a bunch of Kathryn Grayson movies. One of them even has Mario Lanza. I'm one of those people who runs screaming from singers like Grayson and Jeannette MacDonald, but surely there have to be people out there who like them, since the movies were so popular back in the day.

Apparently there's a new book on Lana Turner coming out next month. This one is going to make the claim that it was actually Lana who stabbed Joey Stompanato, not her daughter Cheryl. Apparently everybody got the idea that it would be easier to claim Cheryl did it because she was a juvenile and the defense would be easier. To be fair, though, Lana probably could have claimed self-defense even if she did do it. By all accounts Stompanato was quite violent with Turner.

There's a rather nicer book from Robert Wagner, together with his literary collaborator Scott Eyman. This one is apparently a more nostalgic look at old Hollywood and all the women Wagner new back when he was a dashing young actor. Wagner is also scheduled to appear at a book festival in Palm Beach, FL, in April. I won't be able to make it.

The Legend of Hell House

I noticed that The Legend of Hell House is on FXM Retro tomorrow morning at 11:55 AM and again Tuesday at 7:30 AM. So I made a point of watching it off my DVR today so I could do a full-length post on it.

The movie starts off with a pre-opening credits sequence. Dr. Barrett (Clive Revill) meets British millionaire Deutsch, who has recently purchased the notorious Belasco House. The house is known as "Hell House" because not only is it presumably haunted, the last time anybody tried to investigate what was haunting the place, only one member of the expedition survived. So Deutsch has hired Barrett for the princely sum of £100,000 to figure out what is really going on and rid the house of whatever is "haunting" it.

To that end, Barrett, a physicist by training and not really a believer in the paranormal, has been given leadership of a team involving a "mental" and a "physical" medium. The mental one is young Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin) who, despite being just a girl in Barrett's mind, is one of the best in her field; the physical guy is Ben Fischer (Roddy McDowall), who also happens to have been the one person to survive the previous investigation. Rounding out the team is Mrs. Barrett, who has no expertise but dammit, she's not going to be left alone.

The four get into the house, and it doesn't take long before things start happening. Not only that, but it really does seem to be things that could only happen because the house is well and truly haunted; it's not one of those "I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for you meddling kids" things where the team is going to find a bad guy and literally unmask him. Making things particularly creepy is that Belasco ran the house as a house of debauchery, so the haunting begins to make the female members of the team do some oddly sexual things.

The Legend of Hell House is a tough one for me to grade. I have to admit that I'm not a particular fan of this genre of movies in general. I've given a positive rating to The Haunting, but I tend to prefer other types of horror to the "lock everybody inside a house for a week and see what the experience does to them" genre. So there were times when I was laughing at the ludicrousness of some of what was going on. Ultimately, however, I think The Legend of Hell House does succeed, at least for fans of the genre. If I were going to introduce people to vintage horror, I'd start with a lot of other things. But for people who like horror and want something they're likely not to have seen before, this isn't a bad one.

The Legend of Hell House does seem to be available on Blu-Ray from the TCM Shop.

Glengarry Glen Ross

Tomorrow is apparently Alan Arkin's birthday. I had been looking through my DVR for something available on DVD to do a post about, and decided upon Glengarry Glen Ross before realizing Arkin's birthday was coming up, and it was pure serendipity that Arkin happens to be in the cast of Glengarry Glen Ross.

The setting is an office of a real estate/property development company. The office is a run-down dump, with four agents and their supervisor working it. The agents haven't been all that successful, as the head office brings in a top guy from the corporate office (Alec Baldwin, who only gets the one scene) to shake things up: at the end of the month, whoever has the most in closings gets a car as first prize. Second place gets a set of steak knives, and last place gets fired. Oh, and there's a set of promising new leads -- but you'll only get them if you can close on the old leads we're giving you.

As for the four salesmen, there's Ricky (Al Pacino), who misses the meeting with the guy from corporate because he's trying to close a deal with Mr. Lingk (Jonathan Pryce) at a restaurant. There's also Shelley Levene (Jack Lemmon), the old guy who used to be the top seller but has fallen on hard times; mousy Aaronow (Alan Arkin); and manipulative Dave Moss (Ed Harris). Their immediate boss Williamson (Kevin Spacey) frankly supports the scheme since he sees how worthless the office is and his job is probably on the line too.

None of the three guys who actually shows up to the meeting is happy about it, although Shelley seems to be the one who's actually going to try to close a deal however difficult that might be. Dave, for his part, hits upon the idea of stealing the new leads, and selling them to a competitor and going to work for that competitor. To that end, he's really putting the moves on Aaronow to break in and steal the leads. After all, everybody knows Dave has the motive, bo he needs an alibi while somebody else goes in on the deal with him.

The next morning, everybody shows up to work to find that the place has been burgled and if not quite ransacked, at least disturbed. Meanwhile, two of the salesmen have actually been successful in closing deals: Shelley and Ricky. But as it turns out, both of their deals have catches....

Glengarry Glen Ross is a movie I have big problems with, mostly because of the way the characters are drawn. I've mentioned several times in the past that I'm not a fan of what I call the "comedy of lies", where somebody gets in comedic trouble by telling a lie, and then gets in ever bigger trouble by expanding on those lies. Glengarry Glen Ross isn't a comedy by any means. But the characters all lie incessantly to try to close the deals, and they're all so thoroughly dishonest that it's difficult to like any of them. Ricky, in particular, isn't just dishonest; he's a blowhard spewing philosophical nonsense. They also swear all the time, to the point that the dialogue gets tedious. It's a shame, because Lemmon and Pacino both actually put in good performances.

Glengarry Glen Ross is a movie that probably will appeal to people who like intelligent drama and character study dealing with difficult situations. But I think it's also the sort of movie that's liable to produce a sharp divide in opinions, even more than the sort of movie that could be described as not being very good.

Shorts report: March 23-24, 2017

In and among the March Malice movies there are a bunch of shorts, some of which are worth mentioning.

First up at about 10:10 AM is You Bring the Ducks. This one is a Hal Roach short starring Irvin S. Cobb, who is probably best known as the writer who introduced the character Judge Priest. He did some acting, but not a whole lot.

Electrical Power comes on a little after 7:45 PM tonight, and ostensibly tells us about Hoover Dam. The dam was always legally known as Hoover Dam, but it's called Boulder Dam here because Franklin Roosevelt and the rest of the New Dealers were petty little shits who didn't like that the dam had gotten named after Hoover. Of course, a lot of the New Deal was about petty power that continued into World War II as you can see in Marjorie Main's character in Rationing. Anyhow, back to the short, although it's supposedly about Hoover Dam and its production of electricity, it's really a promotional short for upcoming MGM movies in the 1939 season, with a bunch of recognizable clips.

Night Mail. I mentioned this one a couple of months back. TCM's online schedule has it in between Soylent Green (4:00 AM tomorrow, 97 min), and After the Thin Man at 6:15 AM. There certainly is enough time, then, for a 25-minute short. However, the TCM schedule claims it's starting at 6:13 AM. I'm guessing it will run, but starting a good half hour earlier.